What Pygmalion Promises Me

Recap: Epiphany, the betrothed of Icarus, stands condemned in the court of the gods. This is the tale of how she got there, which started with Icarus’s death at sea. She ran away from serving in the house of her master Celeas, a nobleman of Athens. With the ambition to bring Icarus out of the Underworld, she commissioned a fisherman named Sulaiman to help her sail to the end of the Earth. After searching hopelessly in the Underworld in the midst of danger and warnings from the gods, she finally found Icarus. But, unable to be revived from his ghostly form, Icarus lost faith and left her. Click here to read this story from the beginning.

My betrothed has abandoned me. Icarus is gone.

My love has left me, but the ghost of an old man has just offered to… make me a new one?

“Sorry, what are you saying?” I ask, rubbing my swollen eyes.

“I can make you a new love out of marble,” says the old man. “I apologize, I have completely forgotten to introduce myself. I am Pygmalion.”

“Epiphany,” I say. “But what good is a man made of marble?”

Pygmalion chuckles. “What good is he! Why, he’s everything you could want, because you get to make him yourself. He will never break your heart. He will never leave you. I made a woman for myself, you know. She is perfect.”

“But no more than an image,” I say, sniffing.

“You would be surprised by how much an image can comfort you,” Pygmalion says. “After all, it requires nothing from you! It makes no demands. It never crushes your dreams. My woman’s beauty never fades, and her love for me is alive in my imagination. She says the kindest things to me. She never tells me what to do or critiques me, so I never feel inferior. In her eyes, I am always the best man in the world. Most of all, she is pure and unchanging. Now, wouldn’t that be nice?”

In the heat of Icarus’s betrayal, it does sound nice. Rage fires up again inside my heart. How could he do this to me? How could the gods do this to me?

“You don’t deserve to be alone,” says Pygmalion, as though hearing my thoughts. “Now just describe what you want to me, and I will make an image that will be your perfect companion.”

He is standing now, chisel and hammer still in hand, next to a pillar of ghostly marble.

“Where did you come by that?” I ask. I wonder if I’m dreaming, though I’ve never slept since I’ve been in the Underworld.

“It’s magic,” says Pygmalion with a grin. “I was a great artist and craftsman in my living days, and Aphrodite blessed me with these tools and endless marble, that I might make many beautiful things.”

I consider briefly whether this is what Aphrodite intended for Pygmalion when she gave him that blessing; it strikes me, for just a moment, that she may have intended something different for me, too, when she answered my prayer.

But my flaring anger silences the thought.

“Now, describe him for me,” says Pygmalion, ready at the marble. “Your ideal mate.”

I tell him what I loved about Icarus, thinking of what he was like when we first met. I talk about his virtues — his goodness and kindness, his humor and passion. I talk about his golden hair, ocean-blue eyes, broad shoulders, effortless smile. I talk about how he always went barefoot when it rained, how he adored swimming in the sea, and his love for fishing, fine cheeses, and walnuts with honey. At times my descriptions are interrupted by heaving sobs that threaten to choke me.

Pygmalion listens quietly and works tediously, chipping at the immense block until a form begins to emerge. The face is uncommonly like Icarus’s, the eyes familiar, the dimensions nearly exact. In fact, the image looks terribly lifelike, as though it might take a breath and step free from its foundation at any moment.

When Pygmalion is finished, I stand up to examine the statue, astonished by the sheer artistry and realism rendered from a simple block of stone.

“This is a new man, not the one you lost,” Pygmalion says. “Isn’t he magnificent? You don’t have to cry any more, Epiphany. He will comfort you and never leave you.”

His marble skin looks silken, and I reach out to touch his arm, but my hand falls right through.

“He is only a vapor, just as my beloved was,” I say, a new swell of grief coming over me. “Neither of them can really love me.”

“Ah, that is, that is — a difficulty of being in this place,” says Pygmalion. “If we were in the waking world, he would be fully solid, unchanging —”

“But no more than an image,” I say again. “What I want is something real, Pygmalion. Something unchanging but not… not this static being, not simply a dream. I want more than what my imagination offers.”

Pygmalion gestures at the stone. “But don’t you see? He is perfect!”

I think once more of Narcissus, who desired a static image over the love of a real person.

“I want perfection,” I say, still enthralled by the majesty of the image, “but something is not right about this. It’s all vanity, futile, faint… it cannot breathe. My hands cannot grasp it…”

I think back to the feasts at Celeas’s house and the vacant look I used to see in the eyes of his guests. They were delirious in their festivity, dancing and making merry, eating to their fill. But each time I stood up to sing to them, I saw sorrow beneath. Cup after cup of wine could not cheer them; the finest bread could not satisfy them.

“It’s all broken,” I say, putting my hand through the pristine face of image Icarus.

And I know what it is. This is the tireless damage of our separation from the gods, from Elysium, our true home. We will always live in the shadow, hidden from the light. Life and love will always be just a vapor on this side of Paradise.

And finally I know how to get what I want.

Odysseus’s purpose is not in vain. For all things to be well and right again, we must repair the rift. If Charon is the gatekeeper to the passage to Elysium, and he only responds to the staff of Hades, then there is only one thing to do — for my own sake, and for everyone’s sake.

I must steal the staff of Hades and force open the path to Paradise.

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